Griffiths, Kurtág, Endgame

The latest issue of the journal Music and Literature pays deservingly lavish tribute to the critic, scholar, novelist, and librettist Paul Griffiths. One can read online a wide-ranging interview with Paul, in which he gives an unsparing perspective on the decline of music criticism: "Criticism, in the sense of an engagement that strives to elucidate and interpret rather than award points, seems to me to be integral to a shared culture and unsustainable without such a culture." Several pieces describe the genesis of Paul's Ophelia novel, let me tell you, and the subsequent adaptation by Hans Abrahamsen, one of the great works of recent years. I was particularly interested in Paul's report on recent festivities in Budapest marking the ninetieth birthday of György Kurtág. The event gave tantalizing glimpses of Kurtág's opera-in-progress, Endgame. A series of announcements and postponements of the première, at Salzburg and then at La Scala, has raised fears that the opera may never see the light of day, but the score is clearly at an advanced stage of composition and is already being rehearsed. In Budapest, Kurtág was seen coaching the contralto Hilary Summers on a setting of Beckett's poem "Roundelay," with which the opera will begin. According to Paul, the excerpt suggests that Endgame will be "more abrupt, more disrupted, to be delivered by voices less sure of where the next note, the next word, will be coming from, but that it will also be lit by the later lyricism." One can hear a snippet of the music and catch sight of the full score in a Euronews video, which also shows Kurtág to be in seemingly robust health. Paul reports that the opera is now "confidently expected" for Salzburg in 2018.